In September, it was reported that the Chinese authorities had arrested two people suspected of causing irreversible damage to the Great Wall. The two are said to have used an excavator to knock a large hole through the wall, allowing motor vehicles to pass more quickly to and from a nearby construction site in Shanxi province, where they were both employed. The Great Wall – actually, a composite of many smaller walls, built over many years and then connected – was started almost three thousand years ago, to protect the northern border of the Chinese empire, and is over 21 thousand kilometres in length. It is designated a UNESCO heritage site and is today a major tourist attraction. In other words, what was started as a project to keep people out of China has transformed into a project to bring them to China (at least, temporarily). The hole in the Great Wall will be expensive to repair and the two workers, who have been charged with damaging a cultural relic rather than a military border post, will no doubt be punished for their crime.
The same month that workers were creating a short-cut through the Great Wall, some unknown person(s) used a chainsaw to cut down a two-hundred-year-old sycamore tree, that stood at an iconic point along Hadrian’s Wall, in the north of England. (This site had become famous as a location from a film version of the story of Robin Hood, made in 1991, although why Robin would travel to Northumbria on his way from the English Channel to Nottinghamshire remains a mystery.) Hadrian’s Wall was built slightly less than two thousand years ago, to protect the northern border of the Roman empire and is merely 120 kilometres in length. Nonetheless, it is also a UNESCO heritage site and a modest tourist attraction. Many local people were outraged by the felling of the tree – which appears to have caused some minor damage to a section of the wall – for which there seems to have been no reason other than a perverse desire to vandalise an object of natural beauty. Arrests have been made but no-one has yet been charged with a crime associated with the tree felling.
Turning defensive border walls into tourist destinations is, I suppose, a contemporary variant of turning swords into ploughshares, as recommended by the Jewish prophet Micah. He tells of a time when nations will no longer take up swords against one another and will no longer train their people for war. That world of peaceful international co-existence still seems a long way off, especially in his own homeland, but there is evidence elsewhere that the military need for walls has reduced as societies have slowly learned to live at peace with each other and with themselves.
In the City of Derry, in the north-west of the island of Ireland, you can walk around the elevated city walls, built four hundred years ago to protect the enclave of London merchants who founded the trading post, and learn about the famous sieges and skirmishes that have taken place nearby. In my lifetime, Derry has been the site of terrible violence, including the murder of thirteen unarmed civilians by British troops (none of whom have to date been prosecuted, although there is one case that may yet proceed in the courts), but today it seems a calmer, less troubled place. The city’s walls are symbolic of historic divisions, but the more pressing concerns of residents today are the economic uncertainties caused by the UK’s exit from the EU. The new problem is how to ensure people and goods can move freely across the nearby border, not how to keep them out.
It is the fate of walls to outlast their initial purpose. Built to divide and defend they end up being repurposed as reminders of past horrors, rather than blocking the movement of enemies they become an attraction for foreign visitors, open-air museums where we can celebrate social progress. The best modern example can be found in Berlin. This wall was designed primarily to keep the locals from running away rather than keeping strangers out, but it lasted for only twenty-eight years. The economic and political costs of isolation became unsustainably high, both for the East German autocrats who governed East Berlin and Soviet empire that kept them in power. The mix of euphoria for future freedom and sadness for the passing of a distinctive cultural past, that was felt by many Berliners when they were once again able to cross from the east to the west of their city, are captured beautifully in Jenny Erpenbeck’s recently translated novel, Kairos. And, as a visitor to the city, I have felt both the charm of walking past those sections of the wall that remain in place, now covered with graffiti, and the chill of these same objects – reminders of forced separation and death – preserved in local museums.
The Berlin Wall is gone – the construction workers have made holes everywhere! – and what remains is now a provocation to hope. Jürgen Habermas described his experience in Berlin in 1989, witness to the thousands of people crossing through the wall from east to west: my heart filled with joy at the moment of regained freedom …. There was also a shocked pause: all of a sudden, the monstrosity, absurdity, surreality of everything the Wall stood for was laid bare. A few years later, in March 1995, when asked by an Italian journalist, ‘What does it mean for you to be a German today?’, Habermas replied: To make sure that the fortunate date of 1989 does not let us forget the instructive date of 1945. The breach of the Berlin Wall – which took place thirty-four years ago today – is truly a moment of hope, but of cautious hope, of measured hope, of hope cognisant of how many other walls remain.
There are walls being built along the border of the United States and Mexico, and walls recently built in the occupied Palestinian territories. All along the eastern borders of the EU, there are high, strong, metal security fences designed to restrict the entry of refugees. And in many countries, China most evidently, there are firewalls being constructed across the Internet, to block news and images that the authorities deem undesirable. The ‘Great Wall’ to protect today’s Chinese empire is built not of bricks and stones but of code: it is a wall to protect the people from foreign ideas of freedom.
That many of the empires of the modern world are still building walls, of all shapes and sizes, suggests a persistent failure of political leaders to learn from the past. The Great Wall did not stop Genghis Khan and his Mongol army from invading China, when internal conflicts divided and weakened the empire, made the country vulnerable to foreign power. Hadrian’s Wall was abandoned when the Romans retreated from Britain, due to threats elsewhere in their empire, notably the tribes moving westwards across Germany, including not only the Alamanni and the Ostrogoths, but also the Vandals, from whom modern-day vandals take their name. Walls do not solve problems they merely delay the arrival of the solution.
This autumn in London there is a major retrospective show of work by Marina Abramović, the pioneering performance artist. It is the first time that London’s Royal Academy has devoted its main gallery space to a solo show by a woman artist: another wall has been broken down. In March 1988, she and Ulay, her partner, performed an artwork in which they walked the length of the Great Wall of China. She started at the eastern end, by the Yellow Sea, and he at the western end, near the Gobi Desert. They both walked for ninety days, until they met, roughly at the mid-point. Here they embraced, a few tears were shed, and then they separated. It was the final moment of their twelve-year relationship. They had reunited only to part.
Walls can lead us together or split us apart. Sometimes they can do both at the same time. At least Marina and Ulay made their own free choice about separation, it was not forced upon them by empire.